Georgina Spengler - Paintings for the Keats-Shelley House                                                                                    ITALIANO        CLOSE 

                                  

Georgina Spengler is one of the most steadfast painterly painters I know and that is no small thing in a time when technological invention dominates art as never before.

Born in Athens, the magic cradle of our civilization, she has had a thoroughly American education. She studied at the Boston School of Fine Arts known for its rigorous schooling in all the ways painters worked through the ages, for two years, and at the Corcoran Gallery School of Arts in Washington for three. She worked as a painting assistant to commercial painters. She came to Italy in 1982 and is firmly settled here, exhibiting in Europe and in the United States.

Turner and Constable, De Pisis and Twombly are influences. She has learned from their descriptive free hand, their quicksilvery scrawly, moody, whimsical flow and swift gesture, with fervor she is always committed to medium and métier.

First, abstractions of clouds, then parkland, weather moods, creamy shores, later the intricacy and maps of tendril and petals in a changing challenging search, she has come to look at the Romantic poets with delicate brush and keen mind. Her landscapes are timeless.

Tufts, curdles, puddles, tears, stars, streaks of gentle pigment, roads and curves of paint, sheer rains of it, runny or flat interludes, make a fabric which echoes and murmurs the poets insights.

A coming dawn, a reclining storm, a morning dripping wet, ribbon of beige country road unfurling, gleaming eye of lake or river, vapors of green green in which sits the nightingale pearling her song, blue sparkling ocean by which Shelley reclined in hidden nooks and groves, a melodious wood where Keats found beautiful truth.

The small fluid elements turn into visual clues for a dream of words. Spengler eloquently and romantically, with a sure will of her intelligent mind, gathers the lingering tales into her painting experience. The weather outdoors and the sentences inside intermingle, both solid and fluid, to make a new exhilarating foray into the limitless exploration of paint.

Edith Schloss,

Rome, October 2008